News & Events

Funding

This 'ghost' document is broken. Please inform the site administrator.

27. Forming a sensory map: the role of auditory and visual
cues in the hippocampal representation of space

Supervisor Pair: Jennifer Bizley
and Daniel Bendor

Potential Student’s Home
Department: Ear Institute

The
hippocampus plays an important role in encoding new episodic memories. In
rodents, neurons in the hippocampus are tuned to the animal’s location in
space, commonly referred to as a place field. This suggests that the animal’s location in space is the general
organizing principle by which episodic memories are stored in the brain.
However, one major consideration when interpreting these data is that unlike
humans, rodents rely predominately on smell and touch (through their whiskers)
for sensing the world. Both smell and touch are proximal senses, differing from
the distal senses of auditory and vision that are more crucial spatial
navigation cues for primates and predatory species. Thus the representation of
space by place fields in rodents could be a consequence of proximal sensation,
which ties their sensory world to their immediate location. Whether the
representation of space differs in species relying on distal senses (audition
and vision) is not known. We will study the hippocampus in the ferret, which
unlike the rodent relies on distal sensation (vision and audition) to
navigate. We will examine how the
animal’s spatial location, along with auditory and visual cues drive hippocampal
responses, allowing us to evaluate what aspects of our current rodent-based
model of hippocampal function is generalizable to other species. Since the
rodent is commonly used as a model for studying hippocampal function and
dysfunction in conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, such an evaluation will
have immediate impact. This project will generate novel
data about the representation of auditory and visual cues in the hippocampus
and how their representation underlies sensory learning and memory.

This
project offers a unique opportunity to study how the integration of sensory
cues within the hippocampus underpins memory formation within the mammalian
brain. The student will learn state-of-the-art in vivo recording techniques (multi-tetrode recordings from
hippocampus and auditory cortex), behavioural testing techniques and
computational neuroscience methods.